Users are continually exposed with an ever increasing variety of techniques and devices that provide message communication. For example, users may use client devices (e.g., desktop computers, wireless phones, and so on) to communicate through the use of email, i.e., electronic mail. Email employs standards and conventions for addressing and routing such that the email may be delivered across a network, such as the Internet, utilizing a plurality of devices. Thus, email may be transferred within a company over an intranet, across the world using the Internet, and so on.
Unfortunately, as the prevalence of these techniques for sending messages has continued to expand, the amount of “spam” encountered by the user has also continued to increase. Spam is typically thought of as an email that is sent to a large number of recipients, such as to promote a product or service. Because sending an email generally costs the sender little or nothing to send, “spammers” have developed which send the equivalent of junk mail to as many users as can be located. Even though a minute fraction of the recipients may actually desire the described product or service, this minute fraction may be enough to offset the minimal costs in sending the spam.
To counteract spam, techniques were developed to filter spam from “legitimate” email through the use of “spam filters”. These traditional techniques typically used a generalized spam filter which detected spam by analyzing signatures of the message being communicated. However, a definition of “spam” may vary greatly between users, e.g., an email that is of interest to a first user may be considered spam by a second user. Therefore, the generalized spam filters may provide false positives and therefore filter out email that is of interest to the user, which may be frustrating and diminish the user's experience with the email.